The challenge
Built In had spent thirteen years layering systems on top of systems without a cohesive architectural foundation. CPQ configuration hadn't been meaningfully touched in four years, while the pricing model and product mix — roughly ten SKUs spanning software, subscriptions, and services — had changed substantially, creating bottlenecks late in the sales process.
Years of hands in the production environment had left workflows so intertwined that even simple changes were difficult to make safely, and the internal bench was thin: a junior admin handling one-off tasks, with no one dedicated to systems strategy or architecture. Underneath the visible problems sat quieter ones nobody had measured yet — duplicate accounts flooding in from two different sources, an MQL pipeline losing leads between systems, contract-end alerts reaching nobody, and a Case SLA formula silently under-reporting compliance.
The work
Matched through Laminar's Fellows network, the Fellow partnered directly with Built In's VP of RevOps to own GTM Systems strategy — combining reactive build work across Salesforce and peripheral tools with proactive roadmap planning.
The duplicate flood traced to two sources: a marketing platform auto-creating companies in a race with the Salesforce sync, and five bulk enrichment loads of roughly 10,500 accounts. Both were closed with a blocking duplicate rule, root-domain matching, and a duplicate guard in enforce mode. Connector-created twin accounts fell from 1,515 to 92 on the 90-day comparison. A rebuilt contact-merge job with an audit log followed the discovery that 556 merges had been failing silently.
The MQL lifecycle was repaired — 41 stuck MQLs recovered, new MQL contacts auto-linked to the right account at 98.4% on the first wave, and 326 orphaned contacts relinked with zero errors. SDR routing was rebuilt by company size, and routing added for inbound on account-manager-owned accounts so those MQLs stopped disappearing.
Governance the team had never had went live: six buying-committee roles on the Opportunity with validation rules gating Demo, Deal Review, and Renewal, plus nightly persona classification across 39,212 contacts and a 37,908-contact backfill that ran with zero errors. Revenue signals followed — previous-buyer tracking, first-call automation that surfaced 564 real first calls in 90 days against 116 being counted, and contract-end alerts that had been reaching nobody.
Three bulk territory restructures re-owned more than 18,000 accounts and 50,000 contacts with zero failed records and SDR assignments preserved. Stale enrichment fields were replaced with a billing-address sync across 101,447 accounts with no failures, and the parent-child hierarchy was rebuilt from 1,015 to 1,708 parented accounts after 41% of existing links proved wrong.
On platform health, an Apex test queue stuck since 2022 was unblocked, taking the suite from 124 failing methods to three — 99.8% green — with zero rollbacks, and surfacing two live production bugs along the way. A Case SLA formula under-reporting compliance by roughly 70 points was fixed, taking compliant cases from 310 to 2,133 over 90 days. A sync path was moved to async-after-commit, dropping from 3.2s to 0.9s at 120 contacts.
The impact
What thirteen years of ad hoc growth had left fragile and unmeasured is now a system Built In's revenue team can trust — and one with a dedicated owner rather than fragmented, one-off effort behind it. Data quality problems that had never been quantified now have before-and-after numbers attached to them, and governance that didn't exist is live and running nightly.
Measurement discipline also caught two changes that would have visibly distorted the business before either shipped: a proposed deal-amount switch that would have zeroed 93 open deals, and a formula change that would have wiped fair market value org-wide. And as the original sponsoring stakeholder departed and Operations was reorganized under a new VP, this was the one function that carried the systems roadmap through the transition without interruption. All figures are operator-reported.